Please modify the shield cooldown system!

Vhailorx

I have been making this argument for several months now, but I think that the recent changes have really highlighted this problem.

The shield cooldowns are a terrible gameplay mechanic. They are a brute force attempt to stop people from accumulating super high PVP scores. (for purposes of this post, I will assume that super high pvp scores are a bad thing and that the game should try to end them.)

Shield cooldowns are still a stupid way to accomplish that that goal:

(1) Shield cooldowns increase the price of "normal" game play. this doesn't bother Demiurge or D3, but it's a huge problem for most players. If you want to use two shields in the last 8 hours of an event, then you must spend 225HP instead of 150. That adds up quite a bit over time. And it is especially painful when your roster gets up into the 50s and 60s or above and roster slots become incredibly expensive.

(2) Shield cooldowns make the game much less fun to play. Before cooldowns, I could sit down and shield hop up to my desired score whenever I felt like it. I could do it on my schedule and then just pay for a longer shield at the end of an event. With cooldowns, I have to shield, make sure I will be available in 2-3 or 5-8 hours' time, set an alarm on phone, and hope that nothing comes up in the intervening time. That is a pretty good definition of "not fun." shield hopping is chore that must be endured to get the best rewards. I can't imagine that anyone likes being forced not only to play the game in a specific way, but also to play the game at a specific time.

(3) With the new mmr, attacks are MUCH more frequent. At high scores, this is incredibly problematic because it is much harder to do multi-node hops. this problem is exacerbated by the health shift, which makes matches take longer on average. The only viable solution is to do shorter hops of two or even just 1 match, which leads us to the problem of number 2 above.

(4) there are better ways to accomplish the same goal. Here is one very simple idea: set a hard cap on the number of shields that can be purchased per event. the cooldowns already create a soft cap on the number of shields that can be purchased, so why not just formalize that. people can choose to push or early or late, hop whenever they want, and top scores will still be suppressed.



TL;DR: Shield cooldowns are and always have been awful, they are no fun, make things more expensive for most players, aren't the best way to accomplish their stated purpose, and are even worse after the recent mmr changes. Please remove them or replace them with a better solution!!

Unknown

But if they change the shield cooldowns, people with jobs won't be massively disadvantaged. And the game designers' philosophy behind most of their decisions seems to be "people with jobs shouldn't be able to compete."

wymtime

I agree with the idea of a hard cap on shields. I think another option is to change the 3hr shield to a 4hr shield with a 4hr cool down. This way players who are playing in the last 8 hrs don't have to spend 225 to shield, but can pay 150 like it was before. As it is right now the 3hr shield is fine on weekends, but form me causes havoc Durring the week. Having to take a break at work to try and shield hop is really annoying. I think if you went to a hard shield count 5-6 shields would be more than enough to allow players to reach the 1000 point progression. Some players are still hitting higher scores with less shields, but that has to be expensive. For me to hit 1000 points I am looking at a min of 3 shields and that is 300 HP min.

It is a small price to pay, but before this cost use to be 225 and you could hit 1300 on 3 shields, it was more than worth it and easier to do on your own personal time.

Vhailorx

I am really surprised at the lack of interest in this thread?

Has the community just accepted shield cooldowns? Or even worse, does the community like them?

this mechanic has always seemed like such a terribly designed/implemented system to me, but somehow it seems to have skated by with relatively little criticism.

Unknown

I am totally down with a 4h shield with a 4h cooldown for 100 HP. The 8h cooldown on 3h shield is excessive and makes it less useful as a "regen health packs and then start playing agian" and more of a "start with 3h shield, hop to 8h shield, wait 8h, repeat".

Shield hopping is dead. Or it should be. Too expensive/time consuming/structured/stupid to be fun. Extended climbs with your health packs and shielding time you are unable to play is the way to go. I gave up hopping when timers went in, unless I shield at 975 to set up a single match hop to 1000, and it's worked out fine for me.

GothicKratos

The only thing I think that really needs to be changed is the cooldown periods themselves. I don't think the cooldown period should be any longer than the duration of the shield itself - perhaps even five or so minutes shorter, so you can re-shield if need be without incident.

Unknown

I just posted a lengthy comment on this same topic in the Lethal Intent MMR feedback. Sorry I didn't see this thread first.. totally agree with the OP. Why this isn't getting more thumbs up and attention is beyond me.

Eddiemon

Vhailorx wrote:

(1) Shield cooldowns increase the price of "normal" game play. this doesn't bother Demiurge or D3, but it's a huge problem for most players. If you want to use two shields in the last 8 hours of an event, then you must spend 225HP instead of 150. That adds up quite a bit over time. And it is especially painful when your roster gets up into the 50s and 60s or above and roster slots become incredibly expensive.

How do you define "normal". Is that the gameplay experience of the average user or some other definition of "normal"? Shield hopping to try to get to 1000 is a tool used by the minority of the playerbase, so would better be defined as abberant behaviour than normal.

(2) Shield cooldowns make the game much less fun to play. Before cooldowns, I could sit down and shield hop up to my desired score whenever I felt like it. I could do it on my schedule and then just pay for a longer shield at the end of an event. With cooldowns, I have to shield, make sure I will be available in 2-3 or 5-8 hours' time, set an alarm on phone, and hope that nothing comes up in the intervening time. That is a pretty good definition of "not fun." shield hopping is chore that must be endured to get the best rewards. I can't imagine that anyone likes being forced not only to play the game in a specific way, but also to play the game at a specific time.

Before cooldowns the reward structure was spread out with a requirement to spend heavily on shield hops to achieve the top tier rewards. Which left the top half of the rewards out of reach of the average player. Now your average player who pushes themselves can hit 600 and get more than half the rewards on offer.

(3) With the new mmr, attacks are MUCH more frequent. At high scores, this is incredibly problematic because it is much harder to do multi-node hops. this problem is exacerbated by the health shift, which makes matches take longer on average. The only viable solution is to do shorter hops of two or even just 1 match, which leads us to the problem of number 2 above.

Except enough people are still crossing the 1000 point threshold for D3 not to look at lowering it. It's meant to be difficult to achieve, not a walk in the park.

(4) there are better ways to accomplish the same goal. Here is one very simple idea: set a hard cap on the number of shields that can be purchased per event. the cooldowns already create a soft cap on the number of shields that can be purchased, so why not just formalize that. people can choose to push or early or late, hop whenever they want, and top scores will still be suppressed.

Because the aim of shields isn't to facilitate shield hopping, it is to allow people to stop playing the game when they feel like it. Shield hopping is creative use of game mechanics, but it isn't the point of shields, and if they redesign it so it is easier to shield hop they will reallocate where the top tier rewards are to try and get the same success rate for players. So you don't achieve anything other than making rewards harder for the average player to achieve.

Oh and by making it easier to shield hop you force the people going for #1 to shield hop that many times, increasing the cost of playing for everyone chasing that reward.

TL;DR: Shield cooldowns are and always have been awful, they are no fun, make things more expensive for most players, aren't the best way to accomplish their stated purpose, and are even worse after the recent mmr changes. Please remove them or replace them with a better solution!!

TL;DR: shield cooldowns make it cheaper for most players (most being the majority of the playerbase, not just the 'elite'), make the game more fun by not forcing people to participate and accomplish the stated purpose of reducing shield hopping and making shields more appropriate as 'time spent not playing the game', not 'time hiding between attacks'.

Vhailorx

Eddiemon wrote:

How do you define "normal". Is that the gameplay experience of the average user or some other definition of "normal"? Shield hopping to try to get to 1000 is a tool used by the minority of the playerbase, so would better be defined as abberant behaviour than normal.

Obviously normal is a somewhat squishy term. I was using it to apply to broadly typical use of shields (buy one or two towards the end of an event to secure a reasonable top 100/top 50 placement. I will happily concede that hopping to 1k is not normal. I was not talking about elite players who routinely hit 1k.

Before cooldowns the reward structure was spread out with a requirement to spend heavily on shield hops to achieve the top tier rewards. Which left the top half of the rewards out of reach of the average player. Now your average player who pushes themselves can hit 600 and get more than half the rewards on offer.

You haven't actually addressed my point. For those players that want to score 600+ (ie those players in a top 100 alliance, or with top 100 aspirations), shield cooldowns make the experience of climbing to even moderately higher scores very unpleasant. it is necessary to schedule life around the shield cooldown schedule. that sucks. the prog reward structure is basically completely unrelated to my complaint that shield cooldowns force players to play only at specific times.

Except enough people are still crossing the 1000 point threshold for D3 not to look at lowering it. It's meant to be difficult to achieve, not a walk in the park.

Well, Demiurge did make changes to the MMR on April 13, and solicited feedback on those changes as recently as friday, which suggests that more changes are an option. So I think you are premature to suggest that everything is working properly. nor does your response address my argument: shield cooldowns in combination with the new mmr make 1k harder.

Because the aim of shields isn't to facilitate shield hopping, it is to allow people to stop playing the game when they feel like it. Shield hopping is creative use of game mechanics, but it isn't the point of shields, and if they redesign it so it is easier to shield hop they will reallocate where the top tier rewards are to try and get the same success rate for players. So you don't achieve anything other than making rewards harder for the average player to achieve.

Oh and by making it easier to shield hop you force the people going for #1 to shield hop that many times, increasing the cost of playing for everyone chasing that reward.

Shields may have been implemented in part to allow people to lock their scores. But that fact isn't really relevant because (1) that was pre-time slice, so some people basically couldn't ever play at the end of events; and (2) if that REALLY all that demiurge wanted to accomplish with shields, they could have just allowed players a one-time chance to "lock" their scores so that they couldn't play and couldn't lose points for the rest of the event. Instead Demiurge asked payers to pay for periods of safety, so there were definitely some other motives behind the shield system. I think some forumites have also recalled that shields were also expressly stated intended to add points into the pvp events.

you also seem to think that I am advocating for easier shield-hopping. I'm not particularly interested in shield hopping. In fact, my suggested replacement for cooldowns would aggressively limit shield hopping as much or more than the cooldowns. as for the cost of achieving 1st place going up, who cares? the prog rewards are open to anyone with a decent roster. the top placement reward is available. to 1 out of every 500 players in MPQ. I will happily admit that I pay much more attention to prog rewards than placement rewards.

TL;DR: Shield cooldowns are and always have been awful, they are no fun, make things more expensive for most players, aren't the best way to accomplish their stated purpose, and are even worse after the recent mmr changes. Please remove them or replace them with a better solution!!

TL;DR: shield cooldowns make it cheaper for most players (most being the majority of the playerbase, not just the 'elite'), make the game more fun by not forcing people to participate and accomplish the stated purpose of reducing shield hopping and making shields more appropriate as 'time spent not playing the game', not 'time hiding between attacks'.

Again, I wasn't talking about the "elite" per se. I was talking about those players with 3* and 4* rosters because that is basically the minimum requirement for playing above 600 in pvp. IF we want to talk about 2* players, than we should immediately ignore any discussion of pvp prog rewards structure above 500.

And I completely disagree with your argument. Shield cooldowns don't make things cheaper or more fun. They make no change to what is probably the most common strategy of climbing as high as possible and buying a single shield. They represent a 50% increase in price for what I suspect was a fairly common strategy pre-cooldown of hopping 1 time in the last few hours of an event. Additionally, shield cooldowns are not fun. They are another gate on playtime. but unlike most other play-gates in freemium games, cooldowns dictate WHEN you can play the game, not how much you can play. I think this is an especially un-friendly mechanic for players. I don't think you addressed it at all in your counter argument.

Also, thanks for responding! I always appreciate hearing opposing vewpoints. (but I really cannot concede anything even after hearing your argument. Shield cooldowns seem so obviously bad for players to me.)

Unknown

Eddiemon wrote:

... the aim of shields isn't to facilitate shield hopping...

This quote reminds me of this speech I heard once where the speaker explained the difference between a hacker, and a non-hacker (let's say, your average everyday consumer):

You give, say, an iPhone to a non-hacker and they look at it a bit then ask, 'What's this?' and you answer, 'It's an Iphone'. The non-hacker then asks, "What does it do?". Then you respond, "You make phone calls with it, send and receive email,..." and so on..

Then you give an iPhone to a hacker, and they look at it a bit and they ask, 'What's this?' and you answer, 'It's an Iphone'. The hacker then thinks to his or herself "What can I make this do?".

The point is, the devs gave us shields. I don't ask them what do they do? .. I ask myself "What can I make them do?"